Medical University of Vienna

The Medical University of Vienna is one of the largest Universities in Austria and one of the largest Medical Universities in Europe. It provides scientific work environment for approximately 3000 scientists and 2000 support and administrative personnel in medical and basic research fields. Basic financing provided by the state of Austria amounts to roughly €220 million per annum. Over 11000 students are enrolled in the study programs. Medical University Vienna is involved in delivering patient care to about 90000 patients in the stationary part of General Hospital of Vienna and to approximately 400.000 outpatients each year. Beneficiary 1 is at the MUW in the capacity of lab leader of the Experimental Allergy Lab within the Department of Dermatology. The laboratory is physically located at the Vienna Competence Centre, where there is contact and shared resources with researchers in the Centre for Molecular Medicine, and Institutes of Immunology, and Molecular Immunology. The building is located across from the Vienna General Hospital, which houses our main clinical department and contains a large number of researchers in clinical and basic science, several with whom we collaborate. We have laboratory and office space and a large array of technical equipment for executing the experiments and coordinating tasks outlined in this proposal. Our animal facilities that we use for current experiments will have sufficient space for the experiments that we planned for this proposal.

WP1 and 9 Leader:

Dr. Michelle Epstein is a medical doctor who has specialized in Internal medicine and Allergy and Clinical Immunology recognized in both Canada and in the USA. After post doc fellowships in basic immunology at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Yale University and the National Institute of Allergy, Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, she established a research group in Vienna combining her interests in clinical medicine and basic research focusing on allergic models in mice. Her research addresses three areas related to allergic disease; The initiation of the allergic immune response, The maintenance of the allergen-specific Th2 memory response leading to the chronic or relapsing remitting nature of allergic disease, and Therapeutic approaches abrogate disease. Her laboratory group has established several models to study acute and chronic allergic asthma, including more recent models using novel inhaled and ingested allergens. One of these models will be used to investigate the effect of allergenic GMOs on an existing underlying allergic disorder that was developed in this lab.

This study was funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-3) under grant agreement no.211820 and independently of any commercial input, financial or otherwise. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. None of the personnel involved had a financial or personal conflict of interest with regard to the present study.